Almost exactly 14 years ago, my house in Mississippi burned to the ground, and in a panic, I allowed myself to be convinced that I should move thousands of miles from home, to live in the Northeast. At that time, I had family in Philadelphia,...

I grew up in a tiny, rural community in Southeast Missouri--in an area that is still called the Bootheel. Although I grew up in the tiny town part of my community, most of the area’s people lived outside the town’s limits–out on farms. In the Bootheel, tiny...